In current mainstream travel culture, most people are tourists instead of travelers. Tourists visit a foreign place, take pictures, and then head straight to the next attraction. In order to gain more commercial benefits, local ecosystems are being forced to transform and create greater capacity for accommodating this kind of travel - often resulting in damage to local culture.

In this project, I used service design methodology with the aim to reverse this situation. I started by looking at what influences travel behaviors and experiences with a view to eventually facilitating a culture shift away from tourism, and toward a 'traveller' culture.

notes from locals deliver their local knowledge; handwritten scripts deliver their warm kindness

Final Solution

IMMERS is an innovative service that encourages tourists to immerse in the places they are visiting as well as promoting cultural communication with locals, therefore enabling a more in-depth travel experience. With IMMERS tourists and travelers are able to capture key moments and memories and access to local knowledge through visual and audio records in online and off-line interactions.

About IMMERS

‘IMMERS’ is a innovative service design work, which aims to help people get immersed in, inspired by and get enjoyment from their trip, and thereby fulfill in-depth travel experience in each travel journey.

Conflict is occurring around the world and those conflicts stem from the differences between people - cultural differences, physical differences, language differences and different political viewpoints. In order to alleviate these conflicts, we all know that we need to communicate, try to understand and respect our differences.

However, there are solid borders which exist in our minds - we call them stereotype, prejudice and discrimination. We are deeply influenced by these psychological walls, these borders obstruct every human beings’ ability to communicate with each other and has given rise to the current chaotic phenomena around the world. Therefore, we took stereotype, prejudice, and discrimination as the borders we would like to eliminate.

The Insights

- We avoid contact with others to prevent potential danger and this contributes to cognition bias against out-groups.

The contact hypothesis suggests that physical contact between members of different groups could diminish the impact of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. The circumstances should include these four conditions: 1. Equal status between contact objects 2.Individual communication 3.Common goals to achieve 4.The assistance of authority and social regulation.

Solution

DRINKING CULTURE, medium of culture communication

Air, food and water are metabolic requirements for survival. This is the origin of Cheers Coffee - a service based on a shared need: drinking. There is a strong connection between Coffee and our social lives. Coffee is a catalyst for socialising, a foundation of communication and a symbol of friendly connection.

AIRPORT where culture exchange happens

Airports - places where people, who come from various countries, gather together. However, there are few social exchanges which occur between travellers. We’ve taken this as an opportunity and aim to create physical social communication between people from different backgrounds.

ENVIRONMENT, cosy square makes people feel closer to each other

A flat square covered in a wide carpet featuring a global map. There are no walls, chairs or tables to obstruct visibility or block opportunities for interaction. People sit in the place they feel most comfortable and chat with their Cheers Coffee mates! Moreover, they can learn more about the position of each country on the Earth by walking around the square. Cheers Coffee is located in the centre of the square on the North Atlantic Ocean section of the carpet map.

Concept: coffee + cheers = Beyond Border

How 'Cheers Coffee' works?

How can people exchange their nation identity?

A cosy area beside Cheers Coffee in airports

When people sit on floor, they feel closer with each other. The cosy place remove people's heart defense, people are more willing to exchange their identity when enjoying their coffee.

Environment of Cheers Coffee

service blueprint

Camden elders social care

ELDERS SOCIAL CARE SERVICE IN CAMDEN

A sustainable community-oriented social care networking, which is based on the relationship between locals and local pubs and thereby provide informal health care to the hard-to-reach group of elders.

“How might we enable the elders who live in Camden to socialise more and thereby reduce isolation and loneliness?”

The Insight

In the past 10 years, the Camden's environment has changed a lot. For the people continue living in these areas, they were forced to change their model of lives in their community. Part of elders are not used to this local development, they tend to confine themself at home. On the other hand, we noticed the importance of socialising, people could take care of each other and be happier when socialising. Unfortunately, even there are numerous activities around them; some elders still isolate themselves from contacting community. Therefore, we decided to develop our design on this hard-to-reach group of elders and take care of their mental and physical heath.

Solution

The Cock Tavern is more than just a pub; it is an informal community and social hub for local residents in the area. Most of the guests are regulars, and they stop by for a drink and a chat every day. There is a very strong relationship between the pub man- ager and her customers. She knows the local community and its people very well. She treats her guests like family and helps them if needed. We saw her as valuable asset for connecting the disconnected people and potential care receivers to public and third sector services. Through an iPad, as a platform and tool, we wish to bridge between hard-to-reach communities and the health and social care system.

Project aims to deliver an intervention that would improve the Decathlon's employee experience, while also providing a way to measure the success of that intervention.Decathlon is one of the world's largest sporting goods retailers. For Decathlon group, United Kingdom is a new market, they are trying to open more branches in next few years. They are the enterprise which cares about employee experience, and hope to build a complete internal management for concerning, evaluating, and then improving their employee working experience. From the statistic data they provide, we can tell that communication between managers and staff need to be improved, and lack of clarity related to the priority of their task. After knowing the quantitative results, we conducted contextual interviews with their employees and managers for knowing their context of working.

2. There are diverse management style among managers of different sport goods genre

3. Promote employees to be more autonomous

4. Knowledge sharing and making improvement by everybody's experience

5. Sport challenges create teams' cohesions.

Solution

Our concept was an ask and give platform that facilitated the knowledge sharing process between team members, and allowed specific needs to be brought to light.

Project Video

SOLUTION: #ASK & #GIVE CARDS

How it works?

In a team meeting, employees are given #ask and #give cards. The #ask cards prompt the employee to bring forth a work-related need that they might be struggling with, that perhaps someone else in the team could help them with. The #give cards prompt the employee to share skill that they possess, that might help someone else on the team. When those cards are completed, they are placed on a board so that team members can help each other with specific issues. When #asks are addressed, they are removed from the board.

Proactivity Bank: informal competition between employee

Our concept also has an aspect of competition, with a point-system awarded to #asks and #gives. These points are tallied in a scoreboard, called the “Proactivity Bank”, which shows a visual representation of the proactivity of employees; who has been proactive to seek out help for issues they have, and who has come forth with their skills to see how they can be helpful.

Prototype of board

Process of Development- Decathlon sprint

Cambodian Social Design

Cambodia is a country located in Southeast Asia. With a population of over 15 million, Cambodia is the one of most populous country in the world. Because Cambodia been affected by war factor for a long time, its economy development is relatively slower than other countries. Just like other Developing Countries, street children, sex transaction, transportation, agriculture, etc. Numerous social problems are waiting for governments’ and international’s help.

We went to the local rural area, firsthand experienced local daily life, conducted observations and then kick off a project, which aims to promote locals' living quality in term of sanitary.

The Insight

Toilets are highly relevant to our health. Excrement on the ground contribute to pests breeding, and most pests would result in contagious diseases among human, The diseases and bacteria would infect through our oral mouth. Eventually, people would omit, get sick or gain negative symptoms. In the local rural areas where we went, didn't have any toilet facility, and all of local residents lack of awareness of sanitary. Therefore, at that time, the aims of design are 1. building sustainable, durable toilets for locals 2. help them understand how to use toilets in a correct way 3. raise their awareness towards daily life sanitary.

Solution

Our final solution was building a eco-toilet in two villages.

We stacked red tiles and wood truck as the foundation of the toilets. And then, stirred red sand, cement powder and water into liquid cement, covered on the tiles for building stair and base. Third step, we cut bamboos, pin each fragment together, for making the skeleton of walls and weaved palm leaves on the bamboo skeleton, this wall could shelter the toilets we built, protect them from wind or rain. Eventually, we utilized local limit resource and built up useful and beautiful toilets under the helps from locals.

After the toilets found, we prepared a drama for locals in order to educate them how to use the toilets correctly. The drama can help us overcome language barriers between us and told them the process of using toilets. Following fun education session, in last stage, we invited local residents to demonstrate how to use toilets and they can gain rewards from this activity. During the drama, local residents concentrated on our performance, we can tell their happiness from their faces, and the atmosphere was really lovely. Fortunately, we indeed improved the locals' living quality and environment through this simple movement.

Eco-Toilet illustration part.I

1. The horizon level on the toilets is higher approximately 50cm than the ground for flush excrement easy. Inhabitants need to carry a bucket of water into the toilets when hearing nature calls. And they pour water into the toilet for flushing by themselves.

2. First sinks is the place which excrement accumulates. Excrement would divide into two parts by itself: Solid and liquid part. The solid part will accumulate on the bottom and the liquid part would float on the top.

3. We put some earthworms into second sinks for helping excrement dissolve into nutrition. The second sink is the place where liquid excrement flow into. After the nature ferment, the liquid excrement would become nutritious manure, which is beneficial to plants. Moreover, both two sinks with a long tube on the top for preventing explosion of bio-gas.

4. behind second sink, we dug a 60cm depth hole, put a large number of sticks and leaves into it. The liquid excrement could flow into this hole and therefore nourish the sand and plants.

Eco-toilet illustration part. II

5. We planted some banana trees beside the hole. 1. Banana trees are easy to care, they could grow healthily even without human’s cares 2. Banana could be locals' food 3. Banana trees’ height will shelter the toilet, provide privacy to the users of toilet.

6. Animals will live in banana forest, and animals’ excrement becomes banana trees’ nutrition as well. Moreover, we can indirectly separate the place which human and animals live in, and therefore create the balance between each species.

Across the globe there is a huge problem relating to the over-use of materials, including extraction of raw maters, the energy required to produce new products and materials and ultimately their end of life disposal and the waste generated from these goods. In order to mitigate this up-ward cycle of over-use of the World’s resources countries are beginning to look at re-using and up-cycling materials.

As a modern city Seoul has made a bold public statement with the building of the Seoul up-cycling plaza (SUP) to encourage and boost green industries. The new facilities, spread over 16,500 square meters has a five story building and consists of work spaces focused on encouraging social enterprises (start-ups) and artists to engage in re-using and up-cycling waste to design new products. Currently in Korea only 30 up-cycling companies exist. In order for the centre to maximise its impact, this project explored opportunities for developing services and developing knowledge around reducing waste and opportunities for up-cycling waste through the Seoul up-cycling plaza. We explored how can different communities and individuals across Seoul can be engaged in understanding waste as a resource and how their actions can be translated into more sustainable ways of living.

Research Insights

In the field research, instead of investing whole current ecosystem, we focused on the professionals who are capable to do up-cycling things in the future. Because of this research strategy, we gained more insights on people's cognitions toward eco-friendly, and their obstacles and motivation on making things to be eco. These are the insights we found:

1. Designer are SUP's first professional stakeholder when it comes to the capability of creating/ crafting things. However, unlike most European countries, the knowledge of recycle or up-cycle is not popular among designers. They seldom consider this criteria into their design works.

2. Basically, up-cycling is a process of re-making waste into valuable things. Nevertheless, if these up-cycling products won't be bought by customers, they are just the waste with different appearance.

3. The definition of Up-cycling products is based on: 'supply' of up-cycling materials exceeds 'demand' . If there is an up-cycling product with a good sell in the market, the producer needs to use totally new martial for making their up-cycling products. Eventually, it's not up-cycling product anymore.

4. Some manufactories already had the knowledge of making things eco, they just don't define their works as up-cycling things. It means that the knowledge could be transferred through networking between different professionals, and the effect will be amplified when people cooperate with each other for making eco things.

Solution

Our final social is a design competition in Seoul city, named Green Dots Awards (GDA). The design students are the first round participators, they are going to stand for their own school/ organization and develop their product design concept from a waste material. In GDA, participators and our eco-manufacturers will collaborate and exchange their ideas of making up-cycling products.

‘How can we help young people to feel safe in the local area by understanding different perspectives of safety?’

This framed question was narrowed down from the problem statement from YLC. In our field research, we noticed that local people have diverse perspective toward the Safety of Lambeth. Regardless of the annual criminal statistic report, we insight local people’s cognitions through real interaction with them and defined our main project aim at addressing locals’ feeling of unsafe in different dimension.

The Insights

THREE DIMENSIONS OF SAFETY FEELING

Environment Sector: This aspect includes all the safety issues that involve physical reactions, and physical safety. Streets, parks, people walking around, daylight, and day of the week – these all influence the physical safety feeling of young people in North Lambeth.

Relationship Sector: There are a large number of children and teenagers moving in to the area of Lambeth. Most of them feel lonely because they don’t feel comfortable enough to find new places to go to, or to talk to people who are not their friends.

Future Sector: In the Lambeth development consultation, ‘Support for a job’ was ranked highest in the exercise by the participators, following by ‘Provide youth activities’, ‘Enhance community feeling’ and ‘Provide inclusive places'. Young people might satisfy their physical safety but feel anxious about their next steps of career.

Solution

Needo is an online platform to enable young people to express their real life obstacles by using an avatar to present their current mood and situation. Young people in Lambeth can write down dairy through messaging their animal parter (AI) in a form of conversation. After Needo identifies user’s situation through catching their diary’s hash tags, it can connect each individual to the right local service, as well as help young people meet new friends through fun activities engagement.

" How can we develop new ways of demonstrating the collective voice of Plan International supporters? "

Plan UK's campaign team have acknowledged the opportunity to explore how we can innovate around campaigning conversion mechanisms specifically around petitions. The petition mechanism is an industry standard for collecting names/ support in volume to use for influencing. BIIU would like to understand innovative ways in which Plan UK can gather support from public audiences and express solidarity to influence policy makers – both in the UK and abroad - and make demonstrable impact around Plan UK’s key issues. Plan UK's ambition is to have engaging mechanisms to both capture public support and also express and showcase it to influential decision-maker. Our jobs was to not only come up with a new idea but to provide service context and thoughts around delivery and mobilsation. For Plan UK, we need to provide a fresh way of thinking outside of the sector.

Research Insights

1. Social media platform is always the key, but information on social media lack of trust for public

5. Agree with charity organization's values proposition is the first step of campaigns engagement

6. 'Keeping petition simple' means: close location, less money and less time frequency

Solutions

There are four innovative ideas about petition we delivered to Plan Internation UK:

1. Corridor story

The corridors in museums, galleries or public space present a background story to people. When people walk through this space, just experience the life of aided people. In the end of the corridors, there is an interactive screen, people can Hi-FIVE with the aided person on the screen. The moment that people hi-five, the camera would take a picture for demonstrating their support of campaign. People can leave their name and email for knowing more details about campaign.

2. Balloon stations

The balloon stations always attract children and parents' attention. Plan UK will design balloon of petition support. People can get a fancy balloon after they register campaigns. When people hold the ballon, it advertises the campaign at the same time. In the aided countries, there will be an activities that invited public to release balloon in the air for demonstrating the supports from worldwide to local governments.

3. Music connection

Plan UK edits a charity playlist on Spotify. When people click this playlist and enjoy their music, the screen would deliver a message for thanking their listen and telling them that there is campaign need their support. People can use their hearing to know the background story about aided people and support Plan UK campaign through a click bottom on the screen.

4. Moving garden

Moving garden idea aims to connect craft making to campaign supports. People engage craft making workshop and deliver their support message through their craft works for aided people. In the course, they use body to experience the campaign instead of brain. They can easily put themselves on aided people's shoes and gain more empathy on the campaign through these activities. This crafts would deliver to aided countries for demonstrating the supports from all over the world.

Plan UK - MA Service Experience Design and Innovation

We hold Brainstorming and Prototyping workshop to public

We prototyped 4 ideas with our target users

Concept I. Corridor Stories

People experience aided people's stories through walking through corridor, and support them through HI-FIVE with the people on the interactive screen. The camera catch this HI-FIVE moment for showing supports to local governments.

Concept II. Balloon stations

Through balloon, Plan UK campaigns attract children's and parents' attention. People can get a designed balloon after engagement. Aided countries will release balloon for showing the supports from other countries.

Concept III. Music connection

Plan UK can approach public through music platforms. Through music playlists, people understand aided people's stories and enjoy featured music at the same time, and thereby motivate public to take part in campaign support.

Concept IV. moving garden

Crafting workshop help people use their body to experience the fun of making craft and gain empathy on aided people at the same time. People write their support message on their craft works which would be delivered to aided countries for showing supports of campaigns toward local council.

CHILDREN COMPANION ROBOT

This project stemmed from the Foxconn internal Robot Technology competition in 2014. My department decided to develop a robot with unique scenario. Our value proposition was that the robots are coming for helping instead of replacing human-being, so we took much time on exploring how robots could be beneficial to human-being in.

Future Envision

We enjoy the convenience that technology provide, but we usually lost our 'humanity' while interacting with technology. We all know that the fundamental difference between Robots and modern technology devices is the “Humanity” factor. From the robots, which have introduced into the public, most of them are trying to mimic people’s behaviors, and the appearance of human being. Unfortunately, this development raise people's fears toward the future instead.

Most robot developers focus on developing software programme for making robots behave with humanity, but we emphasize on ‘ how users perceive robots are with humanity’. This question include in culture, environment, society, users, interaction, etc. Through this framed question, these factors drove us to embed the humanity with different characteristics into our robots' design, rather than merely consider about the behaviors what robots might be capable to do.

Solution

YUBO is a children companion robot. It helps children and benefits their development in various ways. It can teach children how to walk, read the bedtime stories for helping children fall asleep, and even helps children learn new things through screen interaction. It is not a robot, which helps people to live more smoothly, but a warm, close, intimate machine friend, which always companions beside people and grows up with them.

Accompany Children YUBO can be adjusted automatically by detecting how tall Paul is, so that Paul can hug YUBO’s hands easily. YUBO can help Paul learn to walk by leading him smoothly.

Emotion Perception YUBO can analyze the color image, 3D depth image and sound signals so that YUBO can detect Amber’s emotion through scan her feature. Therefore, YUBO always can give proper feedback to Amber for funny her master.

Bedtime Story-telling YUBO project a story on the ceiling, kids can watch and hear bedtime stories with lullaby before sleep. Kids would feel peaceful and then fall asleep gradually.

Educational Purpose YUBO can display interesting education content on the screen, and always accompany with them. The content not only show on display, but create interaction with kids.

In the human computer interaction aspect, we focused on YUBO’s expression. From the psychology theory, we know that human-being is very sensitive to face expression, this is how we identify the unfamiliar things if it is consisted of risks or danager or not. We enriched the expressions of YUBO, not only make YUBO feel closer to children, but also make YUBO more trustable and user-friendly. To sum up, we developed so many expression for building up the communication bridge between YUBO and children.

3D GEOLOGY TECHNOLOGY

British geological survey is a national institution which focus on the technology about geology/ geography. Similar to most technology-oriented organisations, BGS is facing some obstacles on transferring their high-quality technique to real-life application. Moreover, they lack of channel and network to apply their technology into different industry. Therefore, in June 2017, BGS cooperated with Geovation, recruited professionals from different aspect, and then hold a Bootcamp in order to brainstorm possible future business plans for transferring knowledge into real application practice.

3D Geological technology was our subject of development. Our purpose was to further develop the “productisation” of 3D geological models through the conversion of surface models to 3D grids (voxels) and subsequent parameterisation using Geosure and Civils rules and methodologies, and plan the possible approaches to impact the market.

Research Insights

Urbanisation, and deeper foundation in most cities, there is a significant increase of risks within architectures located in urban area. There are few approaches could be applied for geological risk assessment. Architects can refer to the reports on-line, but it only provides the geological data from the ground surface to 2 meter depth, nothing more. Therefore, Our team defined this as our opportunity space for intervention of 3D geological technology.

Solution

We choose the present 'Geo-report', which is published by BGS itself, as the start point of transferring 3D geological technology data into industries. Through the channel of Geo-report, BGS can raise geology-relative industries' awareness towards 3D technology. The professional who need 3D geological data know how this data will be beneficial to their business or community. Through Geo-report, BGS will collect reflections from professionals and gain the knowledge about what are the needs in different market. The last step, building up a customized service about geography risk assessment and selling valuable 3D geological information for different company.

Business Relationship Bankbook

Each business card is an individual icon for each person, because it expresses ourselves detail and feature to others, which we want to reveal. Everyday there are 1/20 people would exchange their business card to others. It just likes a networking, each individual is a point, the line connects point-to-point is business cards. We design an APP for people exchanging their card by mobile devices. This APP helps users manage and search their contacts so that people can build up their own contacts bankbook in their life or business.

CODING EDUCATION FOR TAIWAN

In Taiwan, our students grow up in a rigid education system, which always focus on test and score. It always lack of space and incentives of their creativity and imagination. From the viewpoint of education, we cannot promote our technology advantage at all. Many governments have been aware that coding is a great channel of logic training and creativity inspiration, so that western countries included programming in the basic course for every kid. That’s a world trend. From another perspective, coding is a great beginning of learning how to manipulate and utilize technology.

The insights

Guided Education

'Guide' is the most important factor within our education pattern. Spend more time and energy in accompanying children’s growth but sometimes keep distance with children for keeping space of self-reflection for them.

Learning in playing

In elementary education stage, playing and learning should happen simultaneously. We could build their confidence and promote their learning extent. Informal learning can help children comprehend some concepts deeper than formal learning.

Teamwork Learning

Self-centered children get less stimulation between peers, so that they need to learn how to get along with them.

Creativity Enlightening

The Asian education system restricts children’s extensive thinking. Give students a free hand in creating and teachers’ role is giving assistance and methods for fulfilling their ideas.

Solution

Little Engineer Robot Coding Camp

Robots always are kid’s favorites! We combined the “SCRATCH” - brick figure computer language into the teaching content; every child could compile their own code and use SCRATCH to control robots. Furthermore, we package our camp into a galaxy- adventure story, helps children experience how fascinating programming world is, and also understand how technology benefits our lives.